These pictures are quite amazing - more so because some of the detailing almost looks fake. If they are genuine then it shows that our museums pieces and 1940 sets in museums are much more accurate than we might think. I always thought that the age patena that we see in these displays has happened over a long time, and that it wouldn't have existed during the actual period.

However if these pictures are genuine then I shall view museums with a new regard.

In picture 1 the guys ring doesn't look 1940sIn picture 4 the wooden model of the bomber looks old, yet the rest looks new. The three characters outside look out of time, especially the central oneIn picture 7 the steelwork on the crates looks very old, as does the wood, but wood and paint can get knocked about very quicklyIn picture 13 the tractor looks part restoredIn picture 18 the paint on the outside of the tank looks very new, but the inside of the hatch cover very old.

I own some colour transparencies shot between 1938 and 1942 - they are 6x6, not sheet film, and certainly not Kodachrome. Their storage over the years may not have been ideal, they are tape sealed into the original glass slides of the time. However there has been significant degrading of the image and colours. Once again if these WW2 images are genuine the state of preservation of the images is just unbelievable and quite extraordinary !!!!

As I said, remarkable pictures, beautifully lit and on a view camera. If genuine then our museum pieces are much closer to how they actually looked in their day than I ever thought.

I'm glad that the Kodachrome images kept their colors so well. I inherited many film negatives from my parents, and the old 120 Kodacolor(not Kodachrome) negatives are badly faded away, even though stored in light proof boxes and envelopes. The B&W ones are fine, as are my Kodachrome slides from the 1950's and 1960's.

that is what struck me the most about the photos. some really handy lighting for some tough scenarios...especially given the time period. made me rethink my approach to lighting and to possibly give this style a go for a shoot or two. a couple of them definitely seemed inspired by movie set lighting of the time.

as far as the color, there's no way to tell what was done in post after the scanning of the chromes. i wouldn't be shocked if they were slightly enhanced. but even so, they are a testament to the archivability of kodachrome.

These look so good, so long after they were taken, because they were shot in Kodachrome, the most archivally long-lasting of all the practical color films of the time (and, even much, much later as well). It is essentially a three-layer B&W film, each layer of which later has attached to it a very stable primary color dye in processing - a very complex and expensive process that is just recently, unfortunately, unavailable and lost to the pages of history. Those photographers did a wonderful job with what they had - probably 4x5 Speed Graphic types of cameras and horribly "slow" film (i.e., ISO 10?) - by shooting subjects whose movement they could tightly control and either shooting the "type A"emulsion with big cumbersome tungsten floods or the daylight emulsion with flash - not electronic flash, but, most likely, very large, multiple flashbulbs; this last is quite hard to do well without a lot of trial and error, so they had to be very experienced to properly get what they got. Their results were sometimes stilted, compared to the 35mm B&W negative shooters of the time, but they did the best they could and sometimes even overcame that limitation as well.

As to the image manipulation in scanning or in actual post, I actually see very little in the examples shown here. It looks like the images were lightened just a bit from whatever the darker examples represent, plus maybe just a very tiny goose in saturation - overall not much of anything.

We should all be very grateful for the tools we now have and the relative ease it affords in our work. Our predecessors had to bust their humps, generally have to deal with many more technical issues than we do, and work through very cumbersome limitations to achieve what they did. Finally, it's just so much fun to see what these men and women tried to show us of our country and our people in a time not too long ago.